Top 10 Flutter Development Tips and Tricks for Boosting Productivity

 Top 10 Flutter Development Tips and Tricks for Boosting Productivity

Introduction to Flutter Development

Due to its capacity to produce high-performance, cross-platform mobile applications, Flutter has grown to become one of the most well-liked frameworks for mobile app development. Flutter has made it simpler for developers to create gorgeous and engaging mobile apps with its wealth of features and resources. But learning Flutter development can be challenging. In this post, we'll examine some of the finest Flutter tips and tricks that can help developers improve their abilities and produce even better mobile apps in 2023.

Top Flutter Tips and Tricks to Boost Productivity

1. Utilize Hot Reload

Make the most of Flutter's Hot Reload function. This functionality can speed up the development cycle and help developers save a lot of time while working on new projects. Developers may more easily iterate and improve the user interface and experience owing to hot reload, which allows them to see the effects of their changes in real-time. This functionality can speed up the development cycle and help developers save a lot of time while working on new projects.

2. Use the Stable Channel of Flutter

To take advantage of the most recent stable features and fixes, make sure you are using the stable channel of Flutter. Keeping your development environment up to date is crucial for productivity and security because Flutter has a robust release cycle.

3. Organize Your Source Code

Code organization in Flutter is crucial for productivity, efficiency, and maintainability. Developers should follow accepted coding conventions and ideas like clean code and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). Additionally, Flutter's folder hierarchy and file naming standards can be used by developers to keep their code well-organized and simple to maintain.

4. Use Code Generators

Flutter Code Generators can make it simpler to write and maintain code. Code generation is used in Flutter for a range of tasks, including creating code for working with databases, creating code for communicating with online services, and creating code for working with JSON data. As repetitive activities can be automated and less manual coding is needed, code generation can make it simpler to write and maintain code.

The act of transforming data from a structured format, such as a JSON object, into one that can be quickly stored or conveyed is known as JSON serialization. JSON serialization is frequently used in Flutter when interacting with data that is obtained from web services or other external sources. Working with JSON in your Flutter applications is simple because of the built-in support for serializing and deserializing JSON data provided by the Flutter framework. There are several packages that offer the fundamental tools needed to encode Dart objects into JSON, decode JSON back into Dart objects, and parse JSON. When handling configuration files, retrieving data from APIs, or preserving local app state, this functionality is essential. Some of the packages for code generation include freezed, flutter_gen, pigeon, json_annotation and many more.

5. Make Use of Dart DevTools

Dart DevTools is a robust toolkit for Flutter debugging and performance optimization. A browser-based application called DevTools offers features including memory profiling, real-time performance analysis, and debugging. The speed and productivity of the development process can be increased by using Dart DevTools to help developers quickly identify and resolve problems with their code. DevTools can also be used to evaluate the app's performance and pinpoint areas that want improvement.

6. Utilize Flutter Widgets with Gestures

Flutter includes a broad variety of widgets to help create beautiful and responsive user interfaces. Flutter gestures like taps, double-taps, and long presses can be implemented using the GestureDetector and InkWell widgets. Similar to GestureDetector, however when tapped, it also produces a splash effect. Drag and drop interactions can be implemented in your Flutter application using the DragTarget and Draggable widgets.

7. Create a Responsive Design

Responsive design in Flutter is essential for the creation of adaptive user interfaces (UIs) for various screen sizes and orientations for this Flutter provides tools like LayoutBuilder and MediaQuery.

With LayoutBuilder, wrap the app's body and specify the height and width in proportion to the container's maximum dimensions. Then, it keeps an ideal user interface across all screen sizes. The screen's height and width are provided by Media Query. Use the element's height and width as a percentage of the overall screen's height and width. Then, it keeps an ideal user interface across all screen sizes.

8. Use Animated Widgets

Flutter's animated widgets let developers include captivating animations in their mobile apps, improving the app's overall user experience. Developers may design visually beautiful and engaging user interfaces with animated widgets, which improves the app's overall user experience. To build various animations, from straightforward transitions to more intricate animations like page transitions and particle effects, Flutter offers a variety of Animated Widgets. To meet the needs of their own apps, developers can also make unique Animated Widgets.

9. Utilize Flutter Layouts

With Flutter layouts, developers can construct several kinds of app layouts, from simple to complicated. Developers need to have a solid grasp of the various possible layout Widget kinds, their properties, and how to use them efficiently to create layouts that work well with Flutter. They should also be knowledgeable with layout principles, such as applying constraints and aligning items, to design a user interface that is both aesthetically pleasing and useful.

Bonus Tip

One of the many other tips and tricks to boost productivity in the development process is to write comments in the program. The main benefit is that it makes text easier to read. Most of the time, developers/programmers are working in a team so writing merely the code is difficult for others to comprehend. The second reason is that a programmer can't remember everything, so without comments one may forget why one did something and it will be more difficult to troubleshoot and resolve issues that may arise in the future.

10. Android Studio and Flutter Development Productivity

Android Studio for Flutter offers a wealth of effective extensions that can save developers time and increase productivity. It is an integrated development environment (IDE) supports developers in their work by giving them access to a wide range of tools that increase their comfort level when creating complex applications.
Some of the keyboard tips and tricks a programmer can use in Android studio for boosting Flutter development productivity are as follows:

1. View the definition of a widget without visiting its source code: Utilise the Ctrl+B keyboard shortcut to see the source code and view a widget's definition. The definition can be seen without going to the widget's source code by selecting it and pressing Command+Y on a Mac or Ctrl+Shift+I on a Windows keyboard.
2. Select snippet of code for the widget: To choose a widget's code, we typically move the pointer from beginning to end. To quickly pick all of the widget's code, click a widget and then use the Alt+Up arrow key on a Mac or the Ctrl+W key on a Windows keyboard.
3. Access the implementable APIs with just a click: On Mac and Windows, simply press Ctrl+I to view the list of APIs that can be implemented from the base class. Select the one your widget needs.
4. Delete undersired imports: Unwanted and unneeded imports in the file will be displayed by the Dart Analyzer. On Mac and Windows, just remove them before saving the file by pressing Ctrl+Alt+O.
5. Add conditional statements using shortcuts: If, while, and other conditional statements can be directly added in the code without writing the whole syntax. To add a conditional statement to a section of code, just select it and hit Alt+Enter on a Mac or Ctrl+Alt+T on a Windows keyboard. There will be a list of the possible conditional statements. Select the one you desire from those offered.
6. Add iteration statements: By choosing the code and pressing Alt+Enter on a Mac or Ctrl+J on a Windows keyboard, iteration statements like for, while, and so forth can be added just as quickly conditional statements can be added.
7. Search files and classes easily: Simply click Ctrl+N on a Windows computer or Command+O on a Mac to display tabs for files, classes, symbols, and other things opened in a dialogue box. Select the wanted classes or files from there.
8. Format code: Reformat code option can be used to align the code perfectly. To format the code, use Ctrl+Alt+L on a Windows computer or Command+Alt+L on a Mac. Similarly, to place a new line in the code use a comma (,) and save the code by using CTRL+S.
9. Shortcut approach for stateful and stateless widgets in code: When creating a Flutter application, often the whole syntax for stateful and stateless widgets is written. Android Studio can quickly fix this problem. The possible stateful and stateless widgets will be suggested by the IDE when st is written in your Dart code. Select the necessary option from the drop-down list. Widgets can be swapped between stateless and stateful modes at runtime as required using the Android Studio IDE. Simply select the stateless or stateful widget and hit Alt+Enter (on both a Mac and a Windows computer) to accomplish this. A pop-up menu will appear. To change the widget from stateful to stateless or vice versa, use the Convert to option to change.

Conclusion

As we've explored in this comprehensive guide, Flutter offers a plethora of features and tools that can significantly boost your productivity in mobile app development. From leveraging the power of Flutter's Hot Reload function to optimizing your code with Dart Dev Tools, there are numerous Flutter tips and tricks to master.

By staying updated with the stable channel of Flutter, organizing your source code effectively, and utilizing advanced features like Flutter layouts and animated widgets, you can create high-quality, cross-platform mobile apps that stand out.

So, as we move further into 2024, make sure to implement these top Flutter development tips and tricks to stay ahead of the curve and build exceptional mobile applications.

Cross Platform development with Flutter — How Google Classroom gets teachers and students on the same page

Google’s Classroom app, which was originally launched in 2014, is used by 150 million educators and students around the world to organize homework, grades, and communication in the classroom. Available on Android and iOS, development originally began earlier that year and has spanned eras of tremendous change on both mobile platforms. Managing that divergent change, it turned out, was challenging.

Despite efforts toward synchronization, 7 years later in 2021, the Classroom app’s distinct Android and iOS codebases had incrementally drifted apart in features, UI, and implementation. From the most obvious, like screens that took different approaches to the same UI, to the less obvious, like authentication and app start-up logic differences; Classroom had slowly turned into a difficult app to maintain and improve, with two codebases taxing a small developer pool.

A spectrum of options were available, ranging from persevering with the status quo, to adding more developers, to a complete rewrite of both codebases with a cross-platform framework. The team was committed to improvement, which ruled out the status quo option, and then assessed what it would take to stabilize the two existing codebases, which ruled out merely adding more developers. In the end, the team settled on its third choice: reimagine Classroom with a single-source, cross-platform solution, which was ultimately Flutter.

How Flutter simplified the Classroom app

Inconsistent UIs

The most visible of Classroom’s issues — UI variations — forced teachers to intimately know both the Android and iOS UIs. After all, it’s easy to imagine students asking questions about this homework screen and instructions from one platform’s perspective not making much sense against what a student was seeing on their device from the other platform.

The conventional approach is for separate client apps, developed by separate teams, that diverge over time. Only consistent, painstaking work to synchronize every feature can prevent this. In contrast, Flutter’s very nature inverts this default outcome. With Flutter, UIs are the same by default [1] until active work (often in pursuit of adaptability) forces them to diverge for the benefit of the user.

[1] In Classroom’s Flutter client, small, intentional differences remain, like system bars and bottom controls. Flutter preserves those idiomatic platform details while leaving the middle 90% of the screen to be filled by a single UI implementation.

Muddled business logic

Estranged UIs were not the only place where Classroom’s Android and iOS clients were at odds. Shaped by a server-side solution that offloaded some complex business logic to the client, the old Classroom app also dealt with differences across core implementations. Aside from giving rise to the occasional platform-specific bug (which can frustrate an engineer’s attempt to reproduce!), this imposed a considerable mental tax on anyone assessing the correctness of either implementation.

Rewriting Classroom with Flutter solved a slew of bugs, both previously reported and not, simply because of how Flutter handles native platform interactions.

In the original code, years of constant development had occasionally blurred the lines between UI, business, and platform-specific logic. This meant that users’ bug reports were almost always a tremendous effort to isolate, as the whole call stack was potentially guilty. Was a requested file not loading because the file system was being read incorrectly, because of a miscommunication in business logic, or because the UI received the file, but then lost track of it? The only way to find out was to investigate everything.

Of course, Flutter developers can blur these lines and mix logic just like anyone else, but the Classroom engineering team found that following framework best practices made attempts to do so painfully obvious. Flutter’s system of declarative UI strongly advises against accidentally placing business logic within UI widgets, and a new MVVM architecture even helped enforce clear layers of responsibility within the vast codebase that sits behind Flutter widgets.

Flutter apps still periodically talk to the underlying platform — after all, the user journey of uploading and viewing homework can’t happen without using the file system — but here again Flutter’s pattern of quarantining platform-specific logic into dedicated plugins prevents something like routine disk I/O from sneaking into places where it doesn’t belong. The following example shows a realistic way Flutter apps access the file system without muddying up the whole call stack.

import "dart:io";
import "package:path/path.dart" as path;
import "package:path_provider/path_provider.dart" as path_provider;

// Loads the student's saved homework for a given assignment.
// Return value's exists() function will return False if the
// student's dog ate their homework.
Future<File> getHomework(Assignment assignment) async {
  // Use the `path_provider` package to abstract away platform-specific
  // file system quirks
  final Directory homeworkDirectory = 
    await path_provider.getApplicationSupportDirectory();

  // Extract the student's uploaded homework
  return File(
    path.join([homeworkDirectory.absolute.path, assignment.name]),
  );
}

This example is simple, and the Classroom engineering team ultimately developed several of their own plugins to contain more complicated interactions with the host platform. Interestingly, doing so made their native code easier to debug than it had been in their original native apps. How was this possible? Following Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principles in Flutter plugins means hoisting as much business logic as possible into Dart code, leaving only the simplest in-and-out method calls for native interactions. This forces a rock-solid separation between domain logic and platform logic; meaning that any errors in Classroom’s Android or iOS code were probably in isolated, single-responsibility functions that were easily reasoned about.

Performance drains

When a user journey fails, a concrete bug is filed that everyone can agree needs to be fixed. But what happens for softer problems, like slow app startup time that has been getting worse year after year since an app’s launch? Sprinkle in concerns about keeping multiple clients in sync, and suddenly troubleshooting an app’s lethargic bootstrapping flow feels like a hopeless task.

Here, Flutter helped by being fast enough itself to not make the problem worse and, more importantly, by offering the chance at a clean slate. Knowing they were building something new instead of working around the skeletons from years of development, the Classroom team crystallized their authorization and bootstrapping flows by removing redundant API calls, parallelizing other independent API calls, and showing shimmer effects and other UI previews while everything resolved. The result was a staggering 80% reduction in app launch time!

Annotation feature

Most of Classroom’s functionality could be seen as a fairly routine app bringing together users around shared content, like the assignments and uploaded homework. But, one feature stands out as obviously tricky. One of Classroom’s banner features is file sharing, where both teachers and students can create, view, and edit files, including free-form annotation as if drawing on real paper with a pen or marker. This annotation-sharing feature already existed in Classroom’s native Android and iOS clients, so any friction porting it to Flutter would be a deal-breaker.

The Classroom team was able to re-package this annotation functionality in a plugin that delegates platform-specific implementations to separate libraries. For file annotation, those became thin wrappers around the pre-existing native libraries already used in Google One, Google Keep, and the old Classroom app. Internally, Android and iOS have different implementation requirements around file-sharing. On iOS, the Classroom app accesses files through native views, but on Android it opens the Google Keep app directly. However, good plugin design principles were able to isolate these implementation details and still expose a clean, singular Dart API for the rest of the app to navigate. In the end, one of Classroom’s “trickiest” features had been successfully ported to Flutter.

Below is a visualization of Classroom’s annotation feature on Android, outlining the mixture of native and Flutter UI components.

Four mobile screens side by side, collectively showing the user flow to select and annotate a file

More broadly, typical plugin design in Flutter looks like the following, where a single, streamlined interface loads platform-specific libraries which, in turn, use FFI or JNI to talk to the underlying platform. This allows Flutter apps to engage with platform-specific native APIs across all of their build targets without leaking those considerations into Dart code.

A diagram of how to design a Flutter plugin

Looking back

Developer velocity

The Classroom team spent 2 years rewriting their app with a team that grew from 1 engineer (for the initial prototyping phase) to 10 full-time engineers at peak development. This is no small investment, but the team made it on the promise of faster development and maintenance in perpetuity. Classroom launched their Flutter rewrite on iOS in June, 2023 and completed the project by launching on Android in January, 2024. Since then, average engineering time spent on new features has decreased by two-thirds, which is a tripling of developer velocity! After waiting 2 years for any new features, stakeholders have been delighted by the long-awaited arrival of ✨faster feature development✨.

Part of the Classroom team’s decision to rewrite was, knowing that their project would never be “done”, new features were likely to be added long into the future. This allowed for a compelling case that a rewrite, even an expensive one, would eventually pay for itself. The formula for when the Classroom team would hit the break-even point on investment from their rewrite is:

The formula for estimating when increased velocity from rewriting an app in Flutter will exceed the time spent rewriting. The formula is time spent rewriting divided by the reduction in time spent writing features in Flutter equals the number of post-launch features to break even.

In the 9 months since launching iOS, Classroom estimates to have already reclaimed 40% of that initial investment through the tripling of developer velocity offered by Flutter.

Developer experience

The only people made happier by increased developer velocity than stakeholders is — the developers themselves. For the Classroom team, their 3x increase in velocity came from a mixture of only writing each feature once (or at most, 1.5 times in scenarios with heavy native components), eliminating the costs of coordination for two teams whose schedules were often months apart and, of course, hot reload. Hot reload alone, with its ~99% reduction in rebuild times, buoyed the Classroom team’s morale above where it had ever been with their two native clients. In the end, the Classroom team found it easy to attract and retain engineers after their switch to Flutter.

Additionally, the Classroom team found that new features, on average, required at least 50% fewer lines of code to implement. In reality, the decrease is likely quite a bit higher, since not every feature that they built during the rewrite was even properly implemented in the two native clients! Put differently, 50% as many lines of code delivered all the old features, plus coverage of large feature gaps (including offline support on iOS).

Conclusion

Roughly two years after beginning their rewrite, the Classroom team has shipped their app to Android and iOS and added enough additional features to pay down 40% of their upfront investment. Their new app launches almost five times as fast as the old, saving both developers and end-users time and frustration. Looking forward, new features average one-third the development cost in comparison to the old status quo, enjoy simultaneous release on both platforms, and are easier to troubleshoot and maintain. Ultimately, user, developer, and stakeholder morale has never been higher than it became after Classroom switched to Flutter to reinvest in their future.